Neighbors: the Destruction of the Jewish Community at Jewabne, PolandJan T GrossPrinceton University Press £12.99, pp216Buy it at a discount at BOL

Media coverage of this short book has been so extensive as to make any summary almost superfluous. It tells, in unbearable detail, of the humiliation, systematic butchery, torture and burning alive of 1,600 Jewish men, women and children in the Polish town of Jedwabne on 10 July 1941.

This atrocity was perpetrated by their Polish neighbours who had, since June, begun to starve out the Jewish population. It did not involve any German units, though the occupiers and the Waffen SS had made no secret of their own homicidal intentions towards Polish Jews. The joyous, demented sadists of Jedwabne were Poles to a man (and woman).

Jan Gross, who stumbled on the documentary evidence by accident in a Polish archive five years ago, spares us no detail. Jewish men were forced to enact grotesque rituals before being butchered; women were raped and beheaded; babies were trampled to death; finally, more than 1,000 tortured Jews were herded into a barn, drenched with kerosene and torched. The Poles played raucous music in order to muffle their screams. They had surrounded the town to make sure that no Jew could escape (it would appear that there were, in fact, seven survivors).

The massacre at Jedwabne had been preceded by similar atrocities in the surrounding region. At Radzilow, some 1,500 were massacred; 1,200 in nearby Wsosz. In every instance, rituals of humiliation, of slow torture, of unspeakable bestiality accompanied the killings. Though encouraged and sometimes initiated by the Nazi occupiers, the actual mass murders were the work of 'local hooligans'.

In fact, this anodyne phrase masks the involvement, the participation of the vast majority of the local Polish communities, who watched the carnival of Jewish agony with derisive indifference or active approval. When Jewish women strove to drown themselves and their babies in order to escape torture and incineration, there were Poles who stood on the banks cheering them on.

'Around the tortured ones [they included a 90-year-old rabbi] crowds of Polish men, women and children were standing and laughing at the miserable victims who were falling under the blows of the bandits.' The only Polish doctor in the town refused to give any medical assistance to any Jew. During one pogrom which included the burying alive of an eight-year-old boy, it was the arrival of the Germans which saved a handful of survivors.

Gross's chronicle of inhumanity is near to unendurable. As nauseating, though in a different way, is his implacable exposition of the aftermath. After the liberation of Poland, there followed an ice-age of systematic falsehood and amnesia. The hideous pogroms carried out by Poles at Cracow and Kielce in 1946 were either denied or unmentioned, as was the hunting down and murder of the very few Jews who escaped into the forests after an uprising in a death camp.

Before long, German military archives made available films showing Poles in Warsaw cheering and laughing at the spectacle of the last defenders of the ghetto leaping into the flames rather than surrender. These were not shown in Poland. Crimes against the Jews were the doing of the Nazi occupier. This version served the interests both of the communist regime and of Polish nationalism. Of course, there had been heroic Polish men and women who had striven to help Jews. Of course, there were postwar voices seeking to speak the truth. But they were not many and fellow Poles often turned on them in fury. To ask a taxi-driver to take one to the somewhat lamentable ghetto memorial in Warsaw was to risk insult or the assurance that the survival of a Jewish remnant was to be deplored.

Gross tracks down the evidence. An investigation into the Jedwabne horror led to the acquittal of 10 defendants, to the release of another dozen well before the end of their sentences and to the reprieve of the one and only accused actually sentenced to death. Soon, Jedwabne and numerous other names steeped in blood disappeared from the map of permissible remembrance. Professor Gross himself emigrated from Poland in 1969 to escape the vicious anti-Semitic campaigns orchestrated by the government.

After the Middle Ages, Jew-hatred in Germany was sporadic and assimilation seemed plausible. It is in Austria and Poland that anti-Semitism has been visceral, venomous and, it would appear, ineradicable. The Catholic church has played a seminal role in this plague. As Gross points out, it is not only in the benighted Polish countryside that priests and bishops preach Jewish deicide and keep alive the blood-libel whereby Jews kidnap and sacrifice Christian children for ritual purposes.

The current primate of Poland, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, has made no secret whatever of his distaste for Jews. He enacted a policy of peculiar ugliness over the attempt to plant a forest of crosses at the very gates of Auschwitz. To this must be added the Polish conviction, not altogether unjustified, that Jewish intellectuals countenanced and were, though briefly, participant in the coming of Marxist and Soviet despotism. It is a woeful and complex story.

Must it persist? Neighbors has been noted and debated on home ground. If there were those, including allegedly respectable academics, who tried to deny Gross's overwhelming evidence or who simply denounced him as a traitor to Poland's sacred cause, there were those who acknowledged the terrible force and importance of his indictment.

Glemp himself allowed that Gross's narrative was 'incontestable'. The President of Poland has asked his constituents to 'seek forgiveness for what our compatriots have done'. Gross believes that a genuine shift of sensibility is nascent in that tormented land. Nothing can make up for the horror. But if the screams of those burning alive at Jedwabne are heard at last, they may not have been completely in vain.